manas. If there is any justice in tliese views, it is evident
that a literature such as this will only embrace what is
within the scope of a limited horizon, and will have autho-
ritative weight only in regard to things in a more or less
special reference, and that the negative conclusions espe-
cially which may be deduced from such documents must be
received with not a little reservation. A sinoie instance, to
which I limit myself, will suffice for illustration. Suppose
that certain hymns of the tenth book of the Rig- Veda — a
book which the majority of critics look upon with distrust
— had not come down to us, what would we learn from the
rest of the collection respecting the worship of the manes
of the departed ? We might know that India paid homage
to certain powers called Pitris, or Fathers, but we could
not infer from that, any more than from the later worship
of the Matris, or Mothers, this worship of ancestors, or
spirits of the dead, which, as the comparative study of
the beliefs, customs, and institutions of Greece and Eome
shows us, was nevertheless from the remotest antiquity
one of the principal sources of public and private right,
one of the bases of the family and the civic community.
I am therefore far from believingj that the Yeda has
taught us everything on the ancient social and religious
condition of even Aryan India, or that everything there
can be accounted for by reference to it. Outside of it I
see room not only for superstitious beliefs, but for real
popular religions, more or less distinct from that which
we find in it ; and on this point, we shall arrive at more
than one conclusion from the more profound study of the
subsequent period. We shall perhaps find that, in this
respect also, the past did not differ so much from the
present as might at first appear, that India has always
had, alongside of its Yeda, something equivalent to its
great ^ivaite and Vishnuite religions, which we see in the
ascendant at a later date, and that these anyhow existed
contemporaneously with it for a very much longer period
than has till now been generally supposed.
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PREFACE.
xv